Exercise Types and Crossfit

Types of Exercise
Long and slow - metabolic conditioning. Generally should be below 60% HRM. Similar to recovery workouts, but those are usually short and slow, less than 30 minutes, on the day after a hard weight or interval training.  Metabolic conditioning is at least 30 minutes, but can be quite long, depending on conditioning.  Builds aerobic (heart) and metabolic (mitochondrial density).  Do not combine with weights in same workout.  Good to use different muscles from those trained in weights. Stronger By Science article.

Weights, skill work (short and intense with long rests).  Need to rest enough between sets to bring heart rate down and to recover muscle energy. Let HR return to near-resting before each set. Weights are usually periodized so not trying to hit PRs every time. Important to stop far before exhaustion.  Missing weights for several weeks does not result in a decrease in strength (PainScience article). 

Interval training (HIIT, short intense with short rests) training at ~80% HRM. Includes sprinting. Can work close to exhaustion. May be added to weight lifting at end of workout as a "drop set". 

A Note on Crossfit
Distinguishing the public-facing sport of Crossfit from the reality in a Box can be difficult.  Crossfit from the outside, despite introducing functional fitness, looks like a very regressive and simplistic training style characterized by unimodal "short and hard" training, whereas anyone who studies exercise science knows that athletes train at different intensities, not just 100% all the time. And from the inside its clear that's what Crossfit does, with Box coaches setting up interval circuits in their gyms, etc. But all of the official workouts from the Crossfit.com homepage to the Open, to the Sanctionals to the Games look like unimodal exercise.

REDD+

[A note on REDD+]

During the negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol the inclusion of tropical forest management was debated but eventually dropped due to anticipated methodological difficulties in establishing – in particular – additionality and leakage (detrimental effects outside of the project area attributable to project activities). Eventually, the national forest monitoring system was introduced, with elements of measurement, reporting and verification (MRV).

Reference levels are a key component for any national REDD+ program and critical in at least two aspects. First, they serve as a baseline for measuring the success of REDD+ programs in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from forests. Second, they are available for examination by the international community to assess the reported emission reductions or enhanced removals. In that sense it establishes the confidence of the international community in the national REDD+ program. The results measured against these baselines may be eligible for results-based payments.]

Flu

We have been sick with Influenza A, apparently of the lineage from the H1N1 pandemic of 2009. The flu vaccine is not effective against it.  The vaccine did work against Influenza B that was circulating in December, only unvaccinated people got sick with that one, but B is milder than A. 

The most common comment from people who had A this year is that they understand how people die of it.  Ali says she knows now how she will die, not cancer or stroke (her old fears) but just a simple flu.  We both got antivirals and maybe they shortened the duration, but they provide no relief for days. 

The first day you just feel weird, tired, have a slight fever and think you "might" have the flu.  The next day is worse and you have a fever all day and can't eat.  Extreme lethargy sets in.  That night is the worst, fever above 103 and you hallucinate and want to die.  Acetaminophen does nothing for it, but aspirin does help a bit.  On the 3rd day you feel better and can eat a bit, but are easily exhausted.  That night you sweat again all night and now the phlegm gets bad and you wake coughing.  Cough medicine does nothing, but a combination of decongestant and expectant and something to knock you out (antihistamine) lets you rest.  The 4th day is much like the 3rd, and you live in fear of nightime.
You might try to go to work, and you'll get dressed and eat breakfast in a daze, then send in for more PTO and go straight back to bed.  On the 5th day you'll make it in to work and check emails, tell everyone you're not contagious because you haven't had a fever in 24 hours and you washed all your clothes, then get a headache and feel brain dead and go home early.

Its mostly just staring at a wall, watching star trek and trying not to think about anything.  The body has taken over and is going through its reboot sequence and the mind is totally superfluous. The body doesn't want the mind to do anything, but the mind feels it has something its supposed to do, it just can't remember what.  Eventually it realizes the body knows best and the mind finally relaxes, gives up on whatever complicated socially-determined pressures it had programmed itself to believe in, and goes along for the ride.

Missing Mammals?

 Animal population distributions can be assessed using iNaturalist.  The website is used by citizen scientists to report animal and plant observations.  Rare animals may not be mapped well, but my hypothesis is that large mammals are well mapped because humans tend to make note of them.  This may be less true for nocturnal animals, and it also depends on the presence of humans.

Raccoon observation from iNaturalist.

The map above of raccoons and the map below of coyote observations shows that both species are well-distributed across the U.S.  Clusters of observations are probably more likely due to sampling bias around large cities rather than actual differences in population density. 

Therefore, these maps can show overall distribution but may not be as useful for determining densities.

Coyote observations from iNaturalist.

The next map shows that moles do not occur in the central arid and mountainous part of the U.S.  It appears that these animals need mesic conditions and rich soil.

Mole (family) observations from iNaturalist.

In contrast, Pocket Gophers, a similar group of burrowing animals, are found throughout the arid West as well as along the Pacific coast and in Florida.

Pocket Gophers

But another burrowing mammal, the Prairie Dog, is restricted to the arid West:

Prairie Dogs

While the Prairie Dog distribution makes sense at the continental scale, zooming in reveals interesting patterns.  In northern AZ, Prairie Dogs are mainly restricted to the I-40 corridor, despite extensive grassland habitat in, for example, the Chino and Prescott valley area. The data for this zoomed-in view is much sparser than the national map and it is likely that there are many areas with missing observations. 

However, I am confident that any highly-visible Prairie Dog colonies in the Prescott area would have been photographed at some point.  Given the presence of suitable habitat surrounding occupied habitat in AZ, it may be that Prairie Dogs populations have been extirpated and fragmented across northern AZ.

Prairie Dog observations in northern AZ.

Each of the above species distributions can be related to environmental variables, but other mammal distributions are more complex.  Porcupines feed on the growing tips of conifer and deciduous trees, but apparently do not occur in much of the Midwest and southeastern parts of the U.S.  I'm not sure why this would be, as there is plenty of what looks like suitable habitat in these regions, and the presence of the species in the southwest and the northeast spans a large environmental gradient.

Porcupine distribution

Porcupine observations are quite scattered across much of the West, despite the fact that they are fairly visible in trees; birders looking for birds would be very likely to see them. There are large areas of suitable habitat in AZ, for example along the Verde river in Cottonwood.  I'm not sure why this species hasn't been observed anywhere on the Verde river.  Perhaps it has been extirpated from these areas.  Or, the two observations around Prescott may have been of dispersing animals and the population is only reproducing in the higher elevations around Flagstaff.

Porcupines in northern AZ.

Badgers also show a predominantly Western and great-plains distribution.  They need large areas of open space.

Badger distribution

However, in Northern AZ few animals have been observed.  This nocturnal burrowing animal may simply escape frequent detection, or it may be very infrequent on the landscape.  Supporting the idea that humans rarely encounter this animal, many of these observations are road kill.  Interestingly, badgers are found in AZ both in high-elevation mountain habitats and in low-elevation Sonoran desert habitat!

Badgers observations in AZ.

 Another animal with a strange distribution is the Opossum.  It seems to avoid most of the interior arid West, except for southern AZ.  The observations in Tucson would seem to be environmental outliers compared to the populations along the West coast and in the Eastern U.S.

Opossum distribution.  

Much can be learned by studying species distributions and noting where animals have been observed as well as where they have not.  Trying to explain the observed distributions raises many questions. The mysteries surrounding animal distributions are fertile ground for theorizing about animal behavior, history, and habitat needs.

Safety Is A Value

"We talk about what is important to us."
- Jacob Tetlow, APS

Regular safety meetings and striving for constant improvement are a sign that safety actually is important.  APS has regular safety meetings where we try to proactively create safer working conditions.  By sharing and talking about safety incidents we can learn from them before they happen to us.  "The wise man learns from others' mistakes."

APS is implementing a new safety program called Safety Foward, based on the ideas of Todd Conklin, a retired senior safety adviser from Los Alamos National Lab.  You can look up his talks on Youtube or look into his book “Pre Accident Investigations”.  He talks about the difference between resilient and fragile systems. A fragile system is liable to a single point of failure, for example, an operator-dependent system where the only safeguard against risk is the behavior of the employee.  Dr. Conklin says that such a system is basically "alligator wrestling" where you are telling the employee, "don't get bit!".

Some key ideas around moving Safety Forward
Create a resilient safety system: It's not IF an event occurs, but WHEN.
People are the solution: Employees doing the work are best suited to provide solutions to safety risks/hazards.
Focus on being a learning organization: Establish learning teams to collaborate and communicate learnings from an event or known risk.
Focus on leading indicators:  Focus on safety observations and serious injury or fatality (SIF) potential.

More notes

• Failure is the mother of improvement – viewing an accident as an opportunity to improve processes, procedures, and overall culture
• All accidents are not preventable and don’t ask “if” questions – ask “when” questions – sets up individuals to recover better for when an incident happens
• Design a system that knows it will fail
• Detection and correction are the two most powerful tools in safety – getting at the idea of recoverability
• Three main controls to number of accidents include Compliance (procedures, rules, regulations), Design (engineering controls for safety) and human performance (place where work meets the worker)
• The new view of safety looks at workers as the solution rather than the problem
• Safety leaders should be asking what workers need in order to be safe instead of leading safety from a top-down approach

Tactical and Executive Leadership

Notes from a presentation at APS by Jason Gardner, Echelon Front, fomer Navy Sea Air and Land SEAL.

Sometimes good to let people fail so they can improve.

There is often the assumption that if you told someone what to do then it will work, but may not hold true in stressful situations.

Develop culture where everyone is included and understands that their contribution is important.

1. Cover and Move
If teammate fails, we all fail.

2. Keep it Simple
Everyone needs to understand the goal.

3. Prioritize and Execute
Detach from details. Don't be a robot, but don't forget to see yourself from the outside.

4.  Decentralized Command
Everyone leads.  Leadership is not just a title but an attitude. 

Victory Mindset
-Default mode: aggressive.  See and do. Often the most important things to do are in the places we least want to look.
-Innovate and Adapt - aggressively
-Humility: check your ego
-Influence up and down chain of command: develop relationships
-Lead and follow
-Discipline equals freedom
-Extreme ownership: no blame, no excuses.

Australian Wildfires

Extremely large pyrocumulus clouds tower over bushfires in New South Wales and spread over the Pacific Ocean. Sentinel-2A image, December 31, 2019, processed by @andrewmiskelly.  Source.

A pyrocumulus cloud is produced by the intense heating of the air over a fire. This induces convection, which causes the air mass to rise to a point of stability, where condensation occurs. If the fire is large enough, the cloud may continue to grow, becoming a cumulonimbus flammagenitus which may produce lightning and start another fire.  Source.

"Fuels management cannot prevent fires but can change their behavior" but fuels management is limited by budgets and time to burn, especially in droughts." Source.

The BBC has a good overview:

"We’re seeing recurrent fires in tall, wet eucalypt forests, which normally only burn very rarely. A swamp dried out near Port Macquarie, and organic sediments in the ground caught on fire. When you drop the water table, the soil is so rich in organic matter it will burn. We’ve seen swamps burning all around."

"Even Australia’s fire-adapted forest ecosystems are struggling because they are facing increasingly frequent events. In Tasmania, over the past few years we have seen environments burning that historically see fires very rarely, perhaps every 1000 years. The increasing tempo, spatial scale, and frequency of fires could see ecosystems extinguished." Source.


More Info.
Australian Fire Center
Case Study / Educational Info

What We Need More Of, Is Science

No Heroes or Villains
Dodds has a nickname for us humans: Homo narrativus. Dodds, a professor at the University of Vermont, uses mathematics to study social networks. He has argued that people see the stories of heroes and villains, where there are really just networks and graphs. It’s our desire for narrative, he says, that makes us believe that something like fame is the result of merit or destiny and not a network model quirk. (From http://nautil.us/issue/47/Consciousness/to-fix-the-climate-tell-better-stories)

Scientific narratives, if they’re done right, are some of the most powerful of all. They teach us more than facts, mechanisms, and procedures. They convey a worldview of skeptical empiricism and indefinite revision, show us how to negotiate the boundary between our rational and emotional selves, teach us to suspend judgment and consider all the possibilities, and remind us that a belief in objective truth is a deep kind of optimism with massive dividends.

Kirk Johnson, director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, puts it this way: “If you look at how the media treats scientific discoveries, they’ll go to the wonder. ... [They’ll say] ‘here’s this thing that’s been discovered,’ not the process of how we figured it out. And I think that understanding of how we know what we know is so critical ... If you don’t help people understand what those processes are, [if] you just say ‘here’s the answer,’ now they can go onto the web and dial up an alternate answer. I think we’re seeing an erosion of credibility of science to the public because of this huge flood of technology and information.”

This erosion is essential to understanding the modern climate debate. In the words of the philosopher Richard Rorty, “We understand knowledge when we understand the social justification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracy of representation.”4 In the absence of social justification, the public ends up being called on to be the judge of accuracy of representation—in other words, of scientific content

Climate Change Belief Tree

An article in Nautilus magazine analogizes beliefs about climate change to branches on a tree.  I like that the tree diagram emphasizes the unity of thinking about climate change, even if we may be on different branches.  Also, I think it is OK for one person's beliefs to span different branches: belief about the future does not need to be certain but can be probabilistic and can change from one day to the next. 

Diagram and original article by Summer Praetorius.

The article concludes: "What if instead of feeling threatened by differences in opinion, we were to reconceptualize them in much the same way a tree will distribute a canopy to collect as much sunlight as possible—as a multi-pronged approach to getting the job done? In the same sense that both fast and slow processes contribute to Earth change, both steady progress and immediate local action will contribute to climate solutions. Let’s take stock of our pace and work together, thankful there is someone else to fill the space we can’t. After all, we are not lone trees, but a living, connected forest, and balance is essential for stability."

Top 2019 conservation news

Multiple stories of widespread wild animal population declines:

From 10 billion down to 7 billion birds.
The population of birds in North American has fallen by a third in 50 years. Science.

Statistic of the decade: amount of rainforest lost in Amazon.

"Insect apocalypse" in the New York Times Magazine garnered widespread attention. 
In the United States, scientists recently found the population of monarch butterflies fell by 90 percent in the last 20 years, a loss of 900 million individuals; the rusty-patched bumblebee, which once lived in 28 states, dropped by 87 percent over the same period.

the overall abundance of flying insects in German nature reserves had decreased by 75 percent over just 27 years. If you looked at midsummer population peaks, the drop was 82 percent.

It is estimated that, since 1970, Earth’s various populations of wild land animals have lost, on average, 60 percent of their members.

What we’re losing is not just the diversity part of biodiversity, but the bio part: life in sheer quantity....Finding reassurance in the survival of a few symbolic standard-bearers ignores the value of abundance, of a natural world that thrives on richness and complexity and interaction.

Scientists have begun to speak of functional extinction (as opposed to the more familiar kind, numerical extinction). Functionally extinct animals and plants are still present but no longer prevalent enough to affect how an ecosystem works. Some phrase this as the extinction not of a species but of all its former interactions with its environment — an extinction of seed dispersal and predation and pollination and all the other ecological functions an animal once had...

Other News  (Link)
Last female Yangzte Giant Softshell Turtle died
Last Sumatran Rhino in Malaysia died
Jaguar and Koala populations hit by wildfires in Brazil and Australia